Growing up in the new age

This project is the beginning of collaborative research on the counterculture in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s.

Val Williams has worked with a group of partners, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Streetlevel Photoworks, Glasgow and the University of Sunderland to devise this exhibition, and an issue of 'Fieldstudy'.

'This is the arc that ‘Growing Up in the New Age’ emanates from. Ryley’s photographs function like 'aide-mémoires' to aspects of her life – an intimate sharing of stories, memories and emotions that come to life through the form of the exhibition and its related means of drawing in a public. These are augmented by a series of black and white prints by Dave Walkling, whose images of Kirkdale Free School and individuals around the squatting scene add a salient primary source of evidence of the time alongside other objects, letters, documents, clothing and memorabilia which, for Ryley, act as the remains of that larger experience that she grew up with and which in this project, knit the archival with the lyrical together.'

(Malcolm Dickson, Steetlevel Photoworks, 2012)